Plan to revamp high schools in Englewood sparks debate

Liliana Saumet, a parent, addressing Englewood school officials about a plan to have Dwight Morrow and Academies students share class space.

ENGLEWOOD — Dwight Morrow High School’s low academic achievements are what’s really driving the divisiveness over a plan to further meld it with high-achievement Academies@Englewood.

That premise was presented by Englewood school board President Howard Haughton on Thursday night as he proposed creating a focus group of educational leaders to address long-standing academic issues at Dwight Morrow.

Those issues are again being raised because of a recent proposal to have mostly minority Dwight Morrow students and more diverse Academies students attend classes in the same buildings.

“The discussion we’re having is not the problem,” said Haughton, referring to the controversy the proposal has sparked in the Englewood school community, which is confronting a long-standing state recommendation to fully integrate Dwight Morrow. “The problem is the low academic achievement in our schools.”

Lucia Castro, whose son attends the Academies, agreed, telling officials at the packed board meeting that “some parents feel that the academy and the high school kids are divided because of race and social class.” Academies parents, she continued, are “striving to have a higher level of education for our children and for the ones who really want to commit to hard work. I do not think that the Academies were made to exclude people according to color and social class.”

At an academic affairs committee meeting last month, Dwight Morrow Principal Peter Elbert and Joseph Armental, the assistant principal in charge of the Academies@Englewood, proposed a reorganization of the high school campus by class subject rather than educational program.

Students in the high school and the Academies — a rigorous magnet program that accepts students from Bergen, Hudson and Passaic counties — currently attend most of their classes in separate buildings. They take physical education together, and some students take honors classes with Academies students.

Elbert and Armental proposed, instead, grouping all science, technology, engineering and mathematics classes in what is now the Academies building, and all humanities classes in the Dwight Morrow building.

The academies were created in 2002 in an effort to help diversify the district, which at the time was about 97 percent black and Hispanic. The reorganization would help move the district toward full integration of Dwight Morrow High, which Elbert has said was recommended in a 2005 state report but never realized.

But many parents of Academies students turned out for Thursday’s school board meeting to speak against the suggestion.

“Integrating both schools will change the whole concept of the Academies,” said Castro. The program, she said, is “meeting the dream of many of us: having a diverse school, with academic standards that can be compared with other schools in Bergen County.”

Students at Dwight Morrow, which has struggled with low test scores, are not seeing that diversity in their own classrooms, however, according to some parents.

The academies were created as the result of a lengthy, racially tinged legal battle that began in 1985, when Englewood Cliffs, which has a K-8 district, tried to break its sending relationship with Englewood and send its high school students to Tenafly.

The three districts spent years in court arguing over how to integrate and improve Dwight Morrow High. Englewood pushed for one regional high school for the three districts, but the other two communities fought the idea.

The dispute went up to the state Supreme Court, which rejected Englewood’s bid to merge but upheld an injunction that required Englewood Cliffs to continue sending its high school students to Dwight Morrow. However, most Englewood Cliffs families do not send their children to Dwight Morrow but pay tuition at private schools or public high schools in other districts, instead.

The Academies have in some ways accomplished their intended goal. When it first opened nearly 12 years ago, the district was about 97 percent black and Hispanic. As of the 2012-13 school year, the last year for which data are available, about 85 percent of the entire Englewood school population was black and Hispanic.